About Ginger: The Spice of Life
by Kara Larson
25 pages
/ 10000 words
ISBN: 978-1-60370-633-9, 1-60370-633-X
Available file types - html, lit, pdf, prc
Donald is a redhead, but he doesn't feel like he lives up to the stereotype and hype of his hair color. Normal in every way and set in his routine because of a bad experience in his youth, he refuses to venture outside of his comfort zone. Then he meets Brian at the local
Auto Club office, and his world is turned upside down.
Brian is everything Donald wants to be: spontaneous, vivacious and outgoing. He's even been to Antarctica, a place Donald only dreams of going. Caught between the comfort and safety of the life he knows and the thrill of the adventure he's always dreamed of, Donald has to decide if he's willing to add a little ginger to his life.
Sample
All his life, Donald had dreamed of one thing: the icy solitude of Antarctica. Sure, reading Lovecraft's In the Mountains of Madness might have skewed that desire somewhat while he was in high school, but he'd always loved stories about the last wilderness that was left on earth. Any kind of travel to far-away lands thrilled him, but Antarctica seemed like the prize destination, the epitome of exoticness. He devoured any travelogue or memoir he could get his hands on and had actually amassed a decent collection of Antarctic-related literature. His family all thought he was strange -- stranger than usual, even if they didn't give him too much crap about his fascinations. After all, there were worse things to obsess over. And for the normal human being, Antarctica was about as obtainable as the moon. In a family who loved to travel -- who had traveled the world over again and again and gladly sent postcards and knick-knacks home to him -- his obsession made him stand out all the more.
He wasn't sure what was stopping him -- no, he did know. He hated catching others' attention, which would probably explain his lack of romantic partners in the past five or six years. The moment someone's eyes focused on him he froze, which was why he tried to fade into the background as much as possible. That wasn't exactly the easiest task, what with his red hair. There was no beating around the bush; his hair wasn't strawberry blond or auburn. It was firetruck fucking red. He and his sister Nikki had once taken out every color of the crayon box to try and find the exact shade that matched their hair. Every red crayon from copper to red-orange to brick red and chestnut had appeared somewhere in their hair. And since red hair seemed to be some kind of genetic defect on both sides of their families, Donald's relatives never let him or his sister forget how strange they were.
He had traveled outside his comfortable little town exactly two times in his life, and neither had been exactly pleasant. The one family trip to Hawaii when he was nine had pretty much put a fear of any stranger into him, especially after the one Hawaiian lady swore that the sun would never shine again if he continued to wear his hat. While he recognized now that the lady had meant it as a compliment, it had still scared the crap out of him as a little kid. For the entire rest of their week in Hawaii, he hadn't worn the bucket hat that his mom constantly plunked down on his head. As a consequence, he'd suffered second-degree sunburns that had blistered and peeled and generally caused so much pain that he never went outside again without a hat and slathering plenty of sunscreen on every visible portion of his skin.
Donald had never been comfortable with attention, and that only seemed to make him more self-conscious. Kids, being as evil as they were, called him Albino Boy for his pale skin and would occasionally make snarky remarks about his hair, but he didn't get it nearly as bad at school as Nikki did. She got called everything from Pippi to Little Orphan Annie to Carrots, though she at least hadn't cracked a slate over any boy's head. Once they were older, poor Nikki got tormented by the constant questions about if the carpet matched the drapes, or if there was fire down below. At least guys had a little more class when dealing with each other. Not that it was excuseable to say such things to a woman, but they didn't harass him nearly as much. He guessed redheaded women were just sexier and more desirable than redheaded men. Or so he'd thought.
Enter London, and his brief, but painful affair with British culture. He'd gone away for a semester, intending to 'broaden his horizons' by studying in another country. Britain had history, it was home to some of the greatest Antarctic explorers, and they nominally spoke English there. He thought it would be a great experience, especially since supposedly the Irish and Scottish had the highest percentage of redheads in the world amongst their population. His own heritage was some bastardized mix of Scotch-Irish and Viking invaders.
Donald was wrong.